Google cookies to expire after two years?as long as you don’t return

Google has thrown another bone to privacy advocates by tweaking its cookie …

The lifetime of Google's cookies has been significantly reduced as part of the company's efforts to be more sensitive to growing privacy concerns. The company announced today via the Official Google Blog that it has pared down the default cookie duration from its site from a whopping 31 years (expiring in 2038) to two years due to feedback from users and privacy advocates. Starting sometime "in the coming months," Google's cookies will automatically expire after two years of nonuse, meaning that any users that come to Google once, use the search, and never return will only have their search preferences stored on their computers for the next two years.

Worry not: Google's cookies do not store users' search histories. What it does store, however, are language preferences, how many search results per page they like, and SafeSearch settings. But privacy is privacy, and some users are more sensitive to any information being stored than others. And for users who never return, Google believes there's no point in keeping that information for 31 years.

As for returning Google users, the company said that it wanted to ensure that it wasn't causing regular users to artificially reenter their basic preferences all the time. Therefore, the cookies for users that return regularly will automatically renew themselves without any user intervention. 31 years is nothing compared to a continually-renewed cookie from now until... forever. Or at least until your machine goes kaput.

Google's policy will not be ideal to the average tinfoil hat-wearer, and some might argue that two years is still too long to keep data on the computer of a user who will never return to the site. Of course, anyone who is truly concerned about cookie privacy already knows that managing them via browser preferences is the only way to be cookie-free. Firefox, for example, lets you purge cookies at any time or every time you quit the browser. But Google's new cookie policy, in addition to its new server log anonymization policy, show that the company is at least paying attention to some of the objections of privacy advocates.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui